Klanwatch Project

From Guns in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture and the Law (Gregg Lee Carter ed., ABC-CLIO 2002).

By David B. Kopel

The
Klanwatch Project was an operation of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC),
which is based in
Montgomery
,
Alabama
, and headed by Morris
Dees. Klanwatch has been merged into the SPLC's "Intelligence Project," which keeps tabs on "hate groups" and the "Patriot Movement." The
SPLC is a widely-quoted source among journalists and
has a very strong base of donors. Critics, such as the authors of a two-year
investigation for the Montgomery Advertiser, charge that the SPLC is a
cynical fund-raising machine which terrifies donors about non-existent threats,
and that the SPLC dishonestly maligns people for political gain.

The
Southern Poverty Law Center was founded in Montgomery, Alabama,
in 1971 by attorney Morris Dees. Dees, a direct mail entrepreneur, sold
cookbooks, birthday cakes, tractor seat cushions, and rat poison. But Dees became a national figure when he turned his direct
mail skills to George McGovern's successful insurgent campaign for the
Democratic presidential nomination. Dees made
McGovern the first major presidential candidate to raise large sums from
small-sized donations solicited by direct mail.

Direct mail
political fund-raising was in its infancy when Dees
used the 700,000 names on the McGovern mailing list to begin raising funds for
the SPLC. But Dees proved himself a great
master of the new art. The SPLC's endowment stands at approximately $120
million dollars, far more than better-known groups such as the NAACP or the
ACLU. In 1998, Dees was inducted into the
Direct Marketing Association's Hall of Fame.

More
recently, Dees has applied his skills to the
Internet. The SPLC's website has offered visitors the opportunity to buy $30
"Teaching Tolerance" kits, which the website promised to be actually valued at
$325. In 2000, the SPLC and several Internet search engines implemented a plan
by which web surfers who searched for certain intolerant key words would be
redirected to a website run by the SPLC.

In 1999,
the SPLC earned $17 million in income from its investments, and raised $27
million from donors. The same year, the SPLC spent $13 million on its program,
approximately half of which was spent on producing direct-mail solicitations
and paying for postage. The American Institute of Philanthropy gives the SPLC a
D rating because of the SPLC's large excess of income over program
expenditures, and because of the SPLC's refusal to disclose basic financial
information.

During the 1970s, the main focus of
the SPLC was litigation, and the SPLC won some notable cases, including forcing
the Alabama state troopers to adopt an affirmative action program, requiring cotton mills to better working conditions for
employees with brown lung disease, and changing the tax structure in Kentucky.

In 1981, the SPLC began its
Klanwatch Project, which was later expanded to cover a variety of different
targets. In 1986, the Southern Poverty Law Center's entire legal staff quit,
upset that the SPLC was no longer practicing poverty law, but was instead
focused on the Ku Klux Klan.

Although the SPLC did death penalty legal work in
the 1970s, and still touts its "innovative" work in that field, the SPLC no
longer takes death penalty cases. Critics charge that the SPLC's abandonment of
such cases is meant to avoid scaring off the SPLC's mostly-white donor base.
The Southern Center for Human Rights (http://schr.org/center/), an Atlanta
group specializing in death penalty defense, is one of a number of poverty law
organizations which are upset that the SPLC raises so much money, and does so
little (in their view) for poor people and people of color. In 1996, the Human
Rights group's director Stephen Bright denounced Dees
as "a fraud and a conman."

In 1994, the SPLC created a
separate militia watch unit, dedicated to the militia movement and the patriot
movement. Today, these SPLC units have been merged into the Intelligence
Project.

The Klanwatch Project had proved to
be a tremendous revenue center for the SPLC, but even greater fund-raising
success resulted from the rise of the militia movement, and from the Oklahoma City bombing.

The Intelligence Project publishes
a quarterly Intelligence Reportmagazine of information about its target
groups. Staff members conduct training for police, schools, and local groups. The Intelligence Project reports
that its staff has collected "dossiers" on thousands of suspected
militia members or militia sympathizers, and has placed infiltrators in the
militia movement. The Intelligence
Project supplies information to the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.

Intelligence Project staff also lobby state and federal lawmakers, in
support of a variety of laws, such as "Militia Training" bills to prohibit
group firearms training or use accompanied by political discussion. The
Intelligence Project is frequently quoted in American and foreign media as an
expert source on the patriot movement, militias, hate groups, and others. The
Project's periodic reports on the numbers and names of such groups often
attract substantial media coverage. As an expert source in reported
stories,as a background influence on
media attitudes, and through direct mail communication with a large donor base,
the SPLC has played a very major role in shaping what much of the American
public believes about the militia movement and the patriot movement.

Dees is the author of three books. A
Season for Justice: The Life and Times of Civil Rights
Lawyer is a 1991 autobiography. The same year, he received the Martin
Luther King, Jr. Memorial Award from the National Education Association.

Hate on Trial: The Case Against America's Most Dangerous Neo-Nazi,
co-authored with Steve Fiffer, tells
the story of a civil lawsuits that the SPLC brought against Tom Metzger.

Highly publicized anti-Klan and anti-Nazi suits are the SPLC's most
prominent legal work. The most famous came in 1987, when the SPLC recovered
$51,875 for Beula Mae Donald, the mother of a black man who had been
lynched by two members of the United Klans of America. The SPLC garnered $9
million from fund-raising related to the case, and has been criticized by some
people for not sharing any of the fund-raising revenue with Mrs. Donald. The
SPLC direct mail letters touted the size of the verdict awarded by the jury--a
spectacular seven million dollars--but did not mention that the Klans'
seizable assets amounted to less than one percent of the nominal verdict.

Dees
' third book is Gathering Storm: America's Militia Threat, co-authored with James Corcoran.
Dees
warned that the militia movement "could lead to widespread devastation or
ruin." The book argued that the militia movement is the creation of Ku Klux
Klan leader Louis Beam, although Dees wrote
that most militia members were not racists, but rather dupes of Beams'
conspiracy.

The book claimed that the "citzens'
militia movement. . .led to the most destructive act
of terrorism in our nation's history"--the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Fundraising appeals
from the SPLC have continued to tie bomber Timothy McVeigh to the militia and
patriot movements, although no evidence has ever been produced that he was part
of either one.

Dees
did present what he regards as circumstantial evidence, such as the fact thatafter being
arrested, McVeigh only supplied his name, and no other information. This
conduct, Dees noted, is consistent with
instructions for members of the Militia of Michigan if they are captured. Dees did not note that the instruction is also given to
all soldiers of the United States Army, in which McVeigh served.

Gathering Storm also
promoted gun control, and argued that the Second Amendment guarantees no
individual right.

The book was heavily praised by New York Times columnist Abe Rosenthal,
President Jimmy Carter, and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and by most reviewers.

Mainstream
press coverage of the SPLC has generally been extremely favorable; Dees is
subject of an admiring made-for-television movie biography, "Line of
Fire", in which Corbin Bernson portrays Dees.

The SPLC was,
however, sharply criticized in an award-winning investigative 1994
series in the Montgomery Advertiser. The series accused the SPLC of
taking in far more than it spends, of enjoying lavish offices (the current SPLC
office is locally known as the "Poverty Palace," and a new $6 million building
will soon become the new headquarters) and high salaries (Dees makes $275,000 a
year, far more than the heads of almost all other American non-profits), and of
consistently exaggerating its need for money in direct mail fundraising. The Advertisersuggested that the SPLC preyed on gullible northern donors by creating vastly
exaggerated pictures of the prevalence and danger of barely viable groups like
the Ku Klux Klan.

According to the Advertiser,
many non-white former employees of the SPLC complained about racial
discrimination, racial slurs, or condescension within the organization.

Laird
Wilcox, a scholar who studies political extremist organizations of both the
right and the left, and the organizations which oppose them, offers a different
critique: "The SPLC tends to view their critics and the groups they hate as
essentially subhuman ... and the campaign against them acquires the character
of 'total warfare,' where any distortion, fabrication or sleazy legal tactic is
justified in terms of the struggle."

The SPLC's annually-released lists of hate groups, militias, and
Patriot movement groups and leaders has not always been accurate in its
characterizations. For example, Bob Glass, a Jewish owner of a gun store in Longmont, Colorado,
was labeled an anti-semite. Groups interested in Norse mythology have been
labeled as neo-Nazis; groups interested in promoting Southern culture and
romantic views of the Confederacy have been called racist. Militia and Patriot
groups--and even mainstream political conservatives -- have been subjected to
repeated innuendo claiming that they are violent or that they promote violence.

Barbara
Dority (president of Humanists of Washington, executive director of the
Washington Coalition Against Censorship, and cochair
of the Northwest Feminist Anticensorship Taskforce) criticizes the SPLC for
using guilt by association, and for reporting its ideological opponents to law
enforcement agencies, while simultaneously proclaiming its belief in
"tolerance." (Barbara Dority, "Is the
Extremist Right Entirely Wrong?" The Humanist, Nov./Dec.
1995.)

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